A 25,000 Words Longer King Sorrow?
Posted: February 2, 2026, 15:59
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After my editor, Jen Brehl, and some other early readers had a look at the second draft of King Sorrow, it became clear to me that it would be best for the book, commercially if not creatively, to cut 25,000 words. In the end I had to make some hard choices. One of the things I had to clip out was a whole suspenseful subplot about Donovan McBride on Cherokee Island and his not-so-meticulous escape plan. It just about killed me to clip it out, but I saw that it could be excised cleanly, and no one would sense the loss of it. So that was 6,500 words right there.
I had cause to think of it the other day, because while I can’t announce anything just yet (there’s nothing to announce), there might be a future limited edition in which I’m able to put that material back into the narrative. We’ll see. Seems to me that could be pretty cool.
The prospect of restoring one of Van’s best moments to King Sorrow got me looking back on the other things I had to clip out, stuff that’s kind of wild to think about now. In several early drafts, when we first meet Arthur Oakes, he isn’t living with his best friend Van in off-campus housing… he was living with his aunt and uncle, who both had jobs at the school. Yeah, that’s right: Reverend Erin Oakes had a sister! Aunt Kate was a big character too. My mom was especially attached to her, and had real concerns about the way she disappeared from the last third of the novel… I remember my ma wrote me a few hundred words, sketching out what I might do with her.
I hadn’t noticed the way Aunt Kate disappeared from the last third of the book until my mom mentioned it… but that was a good cue that I didn’t need her. She had to go, and that was another 6,500 words.
I fought harder to keep something else: once upon a time, Gwen used to be a smoker. To be specific, she was a pipe smoker. Her father was too, and it was her habit to finish her day by smoking a pipe with him out on the front step. That pipe followed her throughout the story and often appeared at moments of high drama. I remember she banged it down in frustration, in Part I, when her friends were talking about pooling their money to pay off the Nighswanders. Years later, when Gwen is in fairly desperate straits, she goes out on the back step of her house with Robin Fellows and has a pipe while they talk about her options.
It’s a weird but true thing that when I attended John Bapst in Bangor, Maine, several of the girls had corn cob pipes, and would whip them out for a sneaky smoke when teachers weren’t around. I found that indescribably cool and, while working on King Sorrow, it seemed like a little random bit of Maine cultural history worth preserving.
My wife and my U.S. editor didn’t agree with me and one or both of my parents found it a totally valueless affectation. I was dragged kicking and screaming but in the end the pipe went. Maybe if we ever get a TV adaptation (hey! I’m allowed to daydream!) we’ll get the pipe back, but probably not. Although smoking was fairly ubiquitous in the 1980s, you won’t see a single ciggy in The Black Phone movies. Our distributor, Universal, wouldn’t have it. Gwen’s pipe, that was maybe 500 words. More? Maybe more. That pipe kept busy.
If you’re doing the math, you’ve probably realized this tally only gets me to about 14,000 words, and I needed to cut 25,000. Where’d I get the rest? Well, I just made a rule for myself that I was going to cut one sentence from every page, no exceptions. Sometimes I’d get two, or more, but never less than one. I also hacked conversations down to the bare minimum (there is always too much banter in my early drafts). I got there. Barely. And the good news is the psychic wounds have almost healed!
